Design Notebooks

Let’s take a few minutes to review some of your Design Notebooks from last week.

Target Audiences

What is a “target audience”?

Depending on what you’re creating, you probably have several groups of people who you must consider when designing your projects, let’s consider an example from our session downtown last week:

Trenton Storefront Locater – An app that allows local entrepreneurs to find available commercial storefront space in Trenton.

What different kinds of people need to be a part of this system? These different groups are your target audiences.

User Personas

User personas are profiles you create to describe representative user groups of the system you are designing. You create user personas in order to discover the motivation a person may have for using your system.

Challenge Entries

Assignment

User Personas & User Stories

With your group, create a Google Document and create at least 3 user personas representing the types of people who will be involved in your system

Include end users, system administrators and Trenton partners for whom you’re developing the system as they all have needs of and should receive benefits from your system

Create a Google Spreadsheet and title it User Stories

For each User Persona user type, create at least two user stories to identify features that group will need from your system

Create a new slide in your Design Notebooks and title it “User Personas & User Stories”

Add links to your group’s User Personas and User Stories documents

Project Concept Presentations

Meet with your group and work through the Knight News Challenge entry form.

Use this worksheet to prepare your answers before submitting them online next week

Fill it out as completely as possible, using the other existing entries for guidance on how to answer each question

I’ll be providing you with additional team member information for the second-to-last question; you’ll need to include the Trenton partner as a team member. You can also use their previous efforts to help answer the question “What progress have you made so far?”

Come to class with any questions that come up while working through your entry

Come prepared next week to present your draft entry

Submitting Your Work

This week’s homework assignment is due next week before class. When you’ve completed them, post a comment on this page (Who’s Your Audience), including a link to your Design Notebook.

You might also do the math and show exactly how much food or clothing could be purchased with the savings – sort of like a verbal infographic.

Here’s the formula:

State the problem, state the solution, state the reward.

Problem

Start by stating the problem your project will be solving. Try to create a hook that will link the problem to something your pitch audience is already familiar with like “You know how some neighborhoods just don’t have any grocery stores with fresh produce? Some call them food deserts.”

Solution

After stating the problem your project will address, state your solution, and how it’s different from other solutions that might be out there. For example; “Well, our app helps combat food deserts by identifying profitable drop points for local farmers in underserved communities”.

Reward

Finally, state the specific reward users will receive for using your solution. It could be monetary, social, time, etc, for example; “That way, farmers are finding new profitable markets and people who didn’t have access to fresh produce now do – they can even use their SNAP cards so they don’t have to pay out-of-pocket.”

Assignment

Trenton Challenges

With your team, review your notes on the issues and concerns presented by the Trenton Community representatives in class today

Create a new slide in your Design Notebooks, title it “Community Issue” and identify the issue your team finds most compelling

Create a second slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Elevator Pitch”

Together, write out your team’s elevator pitch for a solution concept based on the community issue your team chose

Your team should work together on this, but each of you should create your own copies of the slides and put them in your individual Design Notebooks

Design Notebooks

Teams

We’ll start by creating a quick survey in TCNJ’s Qualtrics Survey tool, which you should get free access to as students at TCNJ.

In Qualtrics, we’ll create a couple of questions, beginning with a “Text Entry” question for your name

Next we’ll create a “Matrix” Question for each of you to self assess your skills along a number of multimedia disciplines including graphic design, web design, games programming, writing and animation/film

Finally we’ll publish our survey

Now, point your browser to the survey web url and take the survey.

Break

Let’s take a short break so I can assess the survey results When we come back, we’ll group up into teams.